dm transaction manager: fix corruption due to non-atomic transaction commit

The persistent-data library used by dm-thin, dm-cache, etc is
transactional.  If anything goes wrong, such as an io error when writing
new metadata or a power failure, then we roll back to the last
transaction.

Atomicity when committing a transaction is achieved by:

a) Never overwriting data from the previous transaction.
b) Writing the superblock last, after all other metadata has hit the
   disk.

This commit and the following commit ("dm: take care to copy the space
map roots before locking the superblock") fix a bug associated with (b).
When committing it was possible for the superblock to still be written
in spite of an io error occurring during the preceeding metadata flush.
With these commits we're careful not to take the write lock out on the
superblock until after the metadata flush has completed.

Change the transaction manager's semantics for dm_tm_commit() to assume
all data has been flushed _before_ the single superblock that is passed
in.

As a prerequisite, split the block manager's block unlocking and
flushing by simplifying dm_bm_flush_and_unlock() to dm_bm_flush().  Now
the unlocking must be done separately.

This issue was discovered by forcing io errors at the crucial time
using dm-flakey.

Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/drivers/md/dm-cache-metadata.c b/drivers/md/dm-cache-metadata.c
index cbd568a3a579..4b73abe9323f 100644
--- a/drivers/md/dm-cache-metadata.c
+++ b/drivers/md/dm-cache-metadata.c
@@ -530,8 +530,9 @@ static int __begin_transaction_flags(struct dm_cache_metadata *cmd,
 	disk_super = dm_block_data(sblock);
 	update_flags(disk_super, mutator);
 	read_superblock_fields(cmd, disk_super);
+	dm_bm_unlock(sblock);
 
-	return dm_bm_flush_and_unlock(cmd->bm, sblock);
+	return dm_bm_flush(cmd->bm);
 }
 
 static int __begin_transaction(struct dm_cache_metadata *cmd)